Web Performance Lab Archives – Page 3 of 3 – LoadStorm

Recently I compared performance tests of our Contact-Us page for embedding an interactive Google map versus using a simple JPEG screenshot with a hyperlink to the full Google map. What I found was that the interactive Google map on average made our Contact-Us page: 3x Slower Page Load Time 7x Larger (cumulative file sizes) 5x more HTTP requests To start I went to webpagetest.org and ran 11 tests from Dulles, VA on the Chrome browser for a 5 Mbps connection targeting our Contact-Us page with the embedded Google map, and I got some rather slow results considering how many optimizations we had recently done […]

We’ve run many tests on LoadStorm’s website and shared the results in different blog posts. These are the first set of experiments for our Web Performance Lab, and we hope you read them because the details can be very helpful to anyone learning about WordPress performance, web scalability and page speed. The results below are focused on page speed measurements – not scalability. We’ve tested several individual optimizations such as page caching and deferring JavaScript. What we haven’t looked at, though, is how well those optimizations work when they’re put together. As we’ve mentioned before, after testing these performance optimizations, […]

Content Delivery Networks are systems designed to increase the capacity of your website. But is it worth implementing? How much does it improve scalability? 10%? 20%? 100%? Would you believe over 300%? How about that it alone quadrupled the amount of throughput our website can handle? Before we delve into the details of the results, we first need to explain what a Content Delivery Network is and how it works, so we can understand why these improvements were so dramatic. How it works A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that takes advantage of server placement, […]

Would you be surprised if we could DOUBLE THE SPEED of perceived page response by simple tweaking of script references? How about if we could make the browser work more efficiently to download more images in parallel, thereby reducing the page load time to about 3/4 of its original – would you find that exciting? If not, you’re not a performance geek, and you should be reading someone else’s blog. Since you are a perf geek, read on for the cool data. For our optimization experiments, we tested two changes concerning the usage of JavaScript in our WordPress site that […]

Instead of passing on the same WPO tips, Web Perf Lab is putting WPO strategies to the test. Along the way, we will be blogging and bringing you the results our real world experiments. It is our goal to share unique, useful tips and tricks that make a difference in web performance. Check out our latest Slideshare describing the concept of the Web Perf Lab: Join the Web Performance Optimization Revolution with WebPerfLab from LoadStorm

Before officially establishing the Web Performance Lab, we did some early performance optimizations of LoadStorm.com. One of those was to install a WordPress plugin called W3 Total Cache (W3TC), which is a plugin designed to enable all kinds of server-side and client-side caching. Two of the features we enabled are types of server caching, and they were “page caching” and “cache preload”. Page caching allows for web pages to be stored in the server’s RAM for faster access times. Cache preloading pre-fills the server cache using an XML sitemap and periodically loads pages into it automatically. For more information regarding […]

An “Entity Tag”, or ETag, is part of HTTP protocol used in conditional GET requests, incorporating caching into the HTTP protocol itself. ETags are meant as an additional way to validate a local cache. The idea is to attach a bit of metadata to the header of each request to uniquely identify a specific version of a resource, allowing the client machine to know if a resource has been changed. When the client makes subsequent requests for the same resource it sends the same ETag in the request header, which the server uses to determine if the resource has changed […]

Taking our benchmarking data was about more than just gathering a solid basis for comparison for our upcoming tests, it was also about interesting discoveries with our existing system. After running 324 tests, we were left with 303 successful results, of which we ended up using 297 since six were thrown out as outliers. Let’s break this down and show you what we found. Performance Tests Our performance tests were all run through www.webpagetest.org, and covered a wide variety of locations and browsers. The connection settings were “Cable (5/1 Mbps 28ms RTT)” for every test. These are the results as […]

Data is pretty much meaningless without something to compare it to. I could tell you that a certain individual weighs 246 pounds after dieting, but it makes more sense to also say that they weighed 310 pounds before they started. The effectiveness of the dieting plan can only be shown by comparing before and after. Similarly, in performing our optimization experiments, it just makes sense to gather some “before” data with which to compare our post-optimization speeds. Gathering our benchmark data isn’t quite as simple as putting our servers on a bathroom scale.  There are many distinct measures of performance, […]

Welcome to the LoadStorm Web Performance Lab! Over the course of the next year, we’ll be bringing you the best in practical performance engineering information. Forget passing on information of others, we do our own experiments to make sure the advice we give is as accurate and usable as possible. This all began with an email suggesting we tune our site to make it faster. After some discussion, we decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. We also decided to share what we learned in tuning our site. You may have […]